All Rise for the Soufflé

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Part of the fun of experimenting with soufflés is the threat of failure. It’s not likely if you understand the principles.CreditCreditGrant Cornett for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.Grant Cornett

By Tamar Adler

Oct. 7, 2015

I found a strange note on my desk a month ago: ‘‘Why do soufflés rise and fall?’’

The handwriting was mine, but the note seemed foreign. I’ve never known myself to seek answers to the puzzles of the physical world. I stopped taking sciences after 10th grade, availing myself of a school policy by which enrollment in A.P. classes on a certain number of subjects entitled a student to choose abject ignorance in others. I would be a better person, I counseled myself, if I practiced finding comfort, as Keats put it, in the universe’s ‘‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’’

There’s much to ponder in a soufflé’s rise without involving science. The gastronomic pleasure we take in risen foods — yeasted bread, a buttery biscuit, a high-risen soufflé — seems to derive less from the half that’s there than from the half that isn’t, from the airy absence that makes presence more keenly felt. It is pleasure linked, perhaps, to the one we feel from other risen things, whether the flight of a bird or a soul released from samsara. Most of us fall — morally and physically — sometimes. Fewer of us rise, at least with the apparent ease of yeast or egg white. Up is the direction we are nudged to head, though, and we admire it.

But a month or so ago I needed science’s advice, and the note in question records the occasion. I wanted to make a soufflé without one of its regular ingredients: flour. And so I consulted experts. The digital record of my correspondence shows me for who I am: opportunistic — ready to take full advantage of the curiosity, scholarship and practical wisdom of others; impatient — I want to be told ‘‘It will rise!’’ or ‘‘It won’t!’’; and yellow-bellied— scared my flourless soufflé will fail and, deeper still, scared my unschooled mind will be unable to understand why a delicate pudding puffs.

So: Why do soufflés rise and fall? For quite digestible reasons, even to someone with my shortcomings. In ‘‘On Food and Cooking,’’ his definitive account of culinary science, Harold McGee defines a soufflé as a foam. As in meringues, that other often-delicious foam, the egg at the dish’s center is its engine, its upward course predicting the rise of the creature whose raw material it contains. Egg-white proteins — ovalbumin, ovotransferrin and dozens more — begin folded up, like tiny ribbons or bits of origami. When subjected to the stress of beating by whisk, the proteins invert their introversion, unfolding and grabbing onto one another, creating bubble walls that then trap the air beaten into them. A form emerges. (Whites are beaten alone, without yolks, because yolks contain fats and lecithin that interfere with bubble bonding.)

In an oven, the foam rises, in accordance with Charles’s law: At a given pressure, the volume of a gas is proportional to the absolute temperature. When air heats up, it expands; when it cools, it contracts. But Charles’s law, McGee writes, accounts for only around a quarter of a soufflé’s rise. The rest comes from water in the bubble walls changing state from liquid to gas. There is now more gas in each bubble, and so they keep rising. Up! Up!

Without flour, or some other solid, chalky substance, the bubble walls would not be as strong. When the bubbles cool, and the air contracts again, they might pop. Reinforced with the starch in flour — or cocoa, which pairs beautifully with melted chocolate and less well with spinach or leeks, which are what I had in mind to puff up — the bubble walls are far more likely to remain intact, even once the air inside them cools. You can put a strong-bubbled soufflé back in the oven, and it will rise again. Up! Up! High heat for one’s souffléing also means a fast and high rise but a more hastily built, less stable structure. Should you like to feel safe — as I learned, via this personal inquest, I do — and also get a soufflé’s cooking done ahead of time, you would make sure to use some flour and cook with low, constant heat, as in a water bath.

Still, I followed my correspondents’ advice to try a soufflé without flour and observe the results. It was a new day — an event I now recognize as the reward and curse of an inquiring mind. Part of never examining why rain clouds gather, why water boils, why birds can fly, is the reward of a stirring faith that they will happen paired with a haunting belief they might not. Girded with science, I knew what was going to happen to my flourless soufflé: It would rise and, out of the oven, quickly fall. I put my soufflé in a hot oven, then turned back to my dinner guests without an instant’s thought as to whether it would rise. It would. It did. I prefer soufflés with flour in them. But I liked the experiment. It was all fun.

The next morning, my scientific spirit shiny as a drop of dew, I wrote down all the questions that popped into my mind with the force and fixture of a hot-air bubble:

Why is the sky blue? Why is fish skin iridescent? Why do bones hurt when it is going to rain? Why do rain clouds gather? Why does water boil? Why can birds fly? Only at the last did I industriously press pencil to page, as an answer sprang directly to my mind: ‘‘Because,’’ I wrote, eluding all internal censors and personal growth, ‘‘they come from eggs!’’